Review - "WELCOME TO EARF"

Last Wednesday, for shits and giggles, I sat down in front of my laptop and put on Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster, Independence Day, as a way of celebrating Canada’s southern neighbours. With my trusty companion, a bottle of wine, I liveblogged the whole experience, and this week I’m posting this pseudo-review, with timestamps, in its entirety. Enjoy.

Review - "Big Things Have Small Beginnings"

A lone figure stands on a dead planet, gazing solemnly at the spacecraft which brought him here, now flying away. As the mothership soars into the stratosphere, the being—a tall, hairless biped with chalk-white skin and uncannily human features—removes his cloak and drinks an oozing, shifting black liquid. In seconds, the compound brings him to his knees, painfully rending him apart at the molecular level until the humanoid tumbles down the adjacent waterfall and dissolves among the rocks below. But from this individual’s agonizing death comes a glimpse of something new. Decayed DNA strands reanimate, one cell splits into another, then another. Like seeds cast into the wind, life spreads.

So begins Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s semiprequel to his 1979 blockbuster—and my all time favourite movie—Alien. I specify “semiprequel” because Scott himself has been wishy-washy about where it sits in the Alien continuum. While it’s set in the same fictional universe, it focuses not on the series’ eponymous monsters but on a species only glimpsed in the original film. It’s a much grander movie, featuring a more cosmic and existential brand of horror than that of its darkly sexual proto-slasher progenitor. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by way of Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing, and with a touch of H.P. Lovecraft to boot; in other words, everything I could ever ask for, give or take some concerns I have with the finished product.

Analysis - Let's talk about Close Encounters

In the fall of last year I embraced a rejuvinated sense of scepticism after reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. With this healthy dose of incredulity I ended up reassessing and ultimately discarding some of the beliefs I had entertained if not necessarily clung to over the years, UFOs and alien visitations among them. While in recent years I wasn't as die-hard a UFO nut as I was in Grade 8--when I actually did a school speech on the topic--I nevertheless enjoyed pondering and casually researching the subject. UFO and ET-related flicks make up the core of my cinematic preferences (although the actual film E.T. is exempt, thank God), and I've had my fair share of late nights discussing this shared interest with my friends around the dying embers of a campfire. Scary nights, come to think of it.

With the knowledge that I'll now regard such stories with a big shaker of salt comes a sense of mild disappointment: yes, the concept scared me a little--a mixture of wonder and the uncanny and heavily fueled by the works of H.R. Giger--but I enjoy being scared. Quite frankly, it's an incredibly sensous feeling, and a sudden injection of fear does a fine job of keeping my ego in check. And nothing quite compares to walking back home alone in the wee hours in the morning, constantly checking over one's shoulder, wary of a flicker in the shadows or a spine-chilling sound or, most of all, an ethereal glow on the horizon.

Strangely enough, my increased scepticism coincides with ever-ascending appreciation for a certain film that, considering its subject matter, I should probably appreciate less: Steven Spielberg's 1977 epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.